In this episode of the O’Reilly Podcast, I talk about issues surrounding stateful containers and services with Tobi Knaup, CTO and co-founder of Mesosphere, whose DC/OS is a platform for deploying stateful and stateless applications on any combination of infrastructure, and Gou Rao, CTO of Portworx, a provider of persistent storage for containers.

Discussion points:

The differences between stateful and stateless containers, and the reasons why “you need both stateless applications and stateful data services to build a modern, data-driven application,” according to Knaup.

Why increased agility—the ability to build applications that are more resilient and scalable—is the primary business case for running stateful services on container platforms.

Knaup and Rao offer their advice on how organizations should start if they’re interested in incorporating containerized stateful services into their architectures. Knaup says, “Decouple what you’re running from why you’re running it, and pick a platform that allows choice of different data services, and run it on whatever infrastructure you need. Rao says, “Choose a product that has metrics in place, that understands how to do things cloud-natively, at container granularity.”

Faced with business and regulatory complexity, Scott Shaw found himself committing some of the software development acts he once condemned. He confesses those sins and explains why they’re sometimes necessary.